Disclosing – Salon

Saturday 18 April, 16 – 20hrs

Nine students of the Inter-Architecture department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie invite you to take part in “Disclosing”. Through installations, new narratives and series of actions, they will carefully reveal to the audience the hidden stories embedded in materials and our constructed environment, following a free interpretation of a Salon.

“Disclosing” is a one-day event, starting at 16.00 on Saturday 18 April 2015. From 16.00 to 18.00 : “disclosing” a series of launches of each installation. From 18.00: open doors, till 20.00 hrs

– a political crisis from a cultural perspective.

“Good evening Ladies and Gentleman, welcome to Castrum Peregrini. My name is Michael Defuster, I am executive director of the foundation. Welcome to our special guests: Vasyl Cherepanin and Mykhailo Glybokyi from Kiev, Yevhen Ghlibovitsky and Yevhen Hulevich from Lviv and Ivan Krastev from Sofia, Bulgaria. A warm welcome to Katherine Watson and her team from the European Cultural Foundation, with whom Castrum Peregrini worked closely together to organize this evening. Special thanks to the ECF for supporting the second try to let this debate take place, after the first one, that was original planned for last December, for several reasons had to be postponed at the last minute. We really appreciated your flexibility and creativity by which some unexpected hurdles were taken.

Castrum Peregrini is happy to present you the lecture conversation of this evening as part of its year programme MEMORY MACHINE. WE ARE WHAT WE REMEMBER. that hosts activities that relate our cultural memory with our identity. CONFLICTING MEMORIES; UKRAINE, A POLITICAL CRISIS FORM CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE refers directly to the setup of our programming: we identify ourselves as individuals and as member of a group by our memories. This process of identification needs to be put into perspective, to be able to avoid its power to exclude. As the subject of this evening will show, identity policies are too often used to overpower others instead of including them.

During the three months between our first attempt in December and now, the situation in the Ukraine has turned to the worse. Although the country is suffering a complete war with the separatist rebels in its east region of Donbas, the main players in the conflict seem to be Putin led Russia as the aggressor and the Western World as the challenged one, represented by the NATO and European Union, for whom Angela Merkel’s Germany is taking the lead to stop the conflict with diplomacy. The ceasefire deal she was able to reach came into force only eleven days ago, on the 15th of this month. But it is already clear by now that the agreement will not stand. Is Putin really eager to occupy the whole of Ukraine? Or is Ukraine once again merely a pawn in the fight for dominance on the continent between the eastern and western powers, like it has been so many times in its history?

This time, the motives of the Russian aggressor are unclear and the reactions of the European Union remain vague and hesitant. Are the Western European countries willing to help the Ukraine to overcome its economic and safety collapse and to get independent from Russian influence? What does the Kremlin want to reach with its actions of disturbance? A huge part of the Ukrainian population is eager to join the European Union, with its promises of self-realization, security and freedom, like the protests on Maidan Square were testifying. In the east of the country, another part is backed by Russia to fight against its own government with the aim to get independence for the Donbas region. In effect, the country itself is culturally split into a western and eastern European identity. What are the differences between those two ways of thinking, feeling and remembering, and why are they so conflicting?

I hope that this evening will give us a glimpse onto the complex rational and irrational forces that are behind the theatre that official politics are presenting us on a daily basis in the media. They threaten not only the destinies of the Ukrainians but also the future of the West Europeans.

Before I give the word to Ivan Krastev I want to mention a special production you can admire in the small room, next to the bar. Yevhen Hulevitsch, director of the Center for Humanities in Lviv presents there the website MAPPING FUTURE HERITAGE: Tropos, Antropos, Topos. The website is using advanced software to visualise networks between places, people, and their ideas. This project was a result of the collaboration of Centre for Humanities of the University of Lviv and Castrum Peregrini. It took place in 2011/2012 as part of Tandem, the cultural manager exchange programme of the European Cultural Foundation. We are grateful that the ECF made it possible to build further on the co-operation we established then.

Ivan Krastev will start the lecture conversation tonight with a statement on the topic. He is the Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, and permanent fellow at the IWM Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the advisory board of the ERSTE Foundation. He is also associate editor of Europe’s World and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy and journal Transit – Europäische Revue. He was the Editor in Chief of the Bulgarian edition of Foreign Policy (2005-2011). He was ranked in the 2008 Top 100 Public Intellectuals Foreign Policy/Prospect List. Since 2004, he has been the executive director of the International Commission on the Balkans chaired by the former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato. He is a co-author with Steven Holmes of a forthcoming book on Russian politics. And Ivan is also participating together with Castrum Peregrini in the Vienna Conversations of the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna.

After Ivan Krastev’s speech, Katherine Watson, the director of the European Cultural Foundation, will take the role of moderator and introduce to you the other speakers of the panel. Ivan Krastev, please!”

PRESS RELEASE

Conflicting Memories: Ukraine

– a political crisis from a cultural perspective

Amsterdam, 17th February 2015

“The EU and Russia are really living in different worlds and the competition is to demonstrate which of this worlds is the real one,” – says Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies, Sofia. Being the expert in politics of Eastern Europe, Krastev will lead the discussion ‘Conflicting Memories’ with Ukrainian activists and cultural thinkers on 26th of February:

– Vasyl Cherepanyn, Visual Culture Research Centre, Kyiv,

– Yevhen Hlibovitsky, Pro Mova, Lviv

– Mykhailo Glybokyi, Izolyatsia, Platform for Cultural Initiatives

The event will take place at:

Castrum Peregrini, Herengracht 401, entrance Beulingstraat on

Thursday, 26th of February at 19:30 hrs.

In old Slavic language ‘Ukraine’ literally means ‘borderlands’, ‘by the border’, symbolic for the country bordering Russia and the EU. But is it an origin for the separatist actions and recent armed conflict? A blurring border on the East of Ukraine is a warning signal for the whole geo-political climate on the post-soviet territory. Looking from the cultural perspective, panelists will debate upon clashing cultural references of the Ukrainian identity, which created the ground for the on-going conflict.

No matter what Kremlin’s agenda is, Ukraine is the most logical spot for the first manoeuvre. This discussion is a great chance to hear a life debate on insider beliefs of Ukraine from both East- and West-Ukrainian perspectives, not shadowed by the media. Cultural and political activists, Vasyl Cherepanyn, Yevhen Hlibovitsky, Mykhailo Glybokyi, are going to give an impulse presentation on their view of the current conflict. The presentations will be followed by a panel discussion, opened for the audience.

Conflicting memories: Ukraine. A political crises from a cultural perspective takes place within the Memory Machine – We Are What We Remember programme of Castrum Peregrini and is established in close cooperation with the European Cultural Foundation (ECF).

On March 31st, Vasyl Cherepanyn will be honoured with the ECF Princess Margriet Award for Culture for the outstanding work at Visual Culture Research Center (Kyiv). The ECF Princess Margriet Award for Culture Award is a platform for showing those whose creative work can truly make a difference to Europe’s varied societies, underlining ECF’s belief that social and political change requires artistic and cultural engagement. The Award was launched in 2007 in honour of ECF’s former President, HRH Princess Margriet of the Netherlands and now annually given to European artists, intellectuals and activists. The prestigious award includes prize money of 25,000 euros per laureate: http://www.culturalfoundation.eu/pma-2015

Castrum Peregrini’s programme Memory Machine – We Are What We Remember about our memory and what it says about who we are: as an individual and as a group, about how collective memory is formed, influenced and eroded. For the full programme, see: www.facebook.com/MemoryMachinebyCastrumPeregrini

Short Bio’s of the speakers:

Ivan Krastev (1965), is the Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, and permanent fellow at the IWM Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the advisory board of the ERSTE Foundation. He is also associate editor of Europe’s World and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy and journal Transit – Europäische Revue. He was ranked in the 2008 Top 100 Public Intellectuals Foreign Policy/Prospect List. Since 2004, he has been the executive director of the International Commission on the Balkans. He is a co-author with Steven Holmes of a forthcoming book on Russian politics. see also: https://www.opendemocracy.net/author/ivan-krastev

Vasyl Cherepanyn (1980), Kiev is founder and chair of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC)http://vcrc.org.ua/en/микола–рідний–укриття/. The VCRC is nominated for the ECF Princess Margriet Award for Culture, March 31st 2015 in Bozar Brussels. more information: http://www.culturalfoundation.eu/pma-2015 Cherepanyn did a PhD in cultural studies department National University of Kyiv / Mohyle Academy.Vasyl Cherepanyn is an activist, artist and teacher at university.

Yevhen Hlibovytsky, (1976), is a founder of pro.mova, an independent think tank that conducts research on cultural values in the post-Soviet countries and inside Ukraine. His educational background is in political science, professional background (until 2005) in political journalism. This year he was involved in the establishment of the station HromadskeTV, a prototype of Public Service Broadcast in Ukraine. He is a lecturer at the UkrainianCatholicUniversity in Lviv and Kyiv-Mohyla

Avrum Burgs speech

at the opening of

the exhibition

Family Affairs

Family Affair

Avraham Burg, author and former speaker of the Knesset, opened the exhibition FAMLIY AFFAIR with a lecture on 22 January 2015 at Castrum Peregrini, Amsterdam. The exhibition with photographs by Reli Avrahamiand texts by Avner Avrahamishowcases how inclusive a society can be, how the human level overcomes divisions.

An exhibition curated by Galia Zur Geev and produced by Jüdisches Museum Hohenems.

The exhibition was on show until 28 February 2015.

For ten years, Reli Avrahami and Avner Avrahami have wandered throughout Israel, photographing hundreds of families and questioning them about their daily lives, about their dreams and beliefs, their origins and their relations. Their portraits appeared week by week Haaretz becoming a routine for Israeli readers that encountered a variety of people through a colourful photograph and a very personal text. The traces of tensions in the Israeli society, national and religious, social, political or ethnic, are visible in the ambience of everyday life, in the environment of living rooms and family stories of those born in the country or immigrated, Jews and Arabs, Muslims, and Christians, coming from Europe, Africa, and Asia. Of the hundreds of families and their stories, about 80 were selected for this exhibition and a few new portraits have been especially produced of families from Amsterdam.

Family Affair is part of Castrum Peregrini’s programme Memory Machine. We are what we remember about our memory and what it says about who we are: as an individual and as a group, about how collective memory is formed, influenced and eroded. For the full programme, see: www.facebook.com/MemoryMachinebyCastrumPeregrini

About the artists and the curator:

Reli Avrahami is photographer. She was born in Israel in 1960. She works and lives in Israel. On 6th January 2015, Reli received the prestigious Enrike Kablin Awardin photography for her oeuvre: “The portraits and families photos of Reli Avrahami are carved in the Israeli collective memory and accompany the view of the Israeli society of itself. The photographer-artist, active since the mid-80’s, is counted with the elite journalism photographers in Israel. She puts in front of her camera people and faces from every social class, age, sex and origin, and captures them with persistent loyalty to her esthetical agenda. … For her commitment to social photography in Israel and her contribution to the status of photography in the public consciousness andconversation, the Kablin award for her oeuvre is given to her.” Together with her husband author and journalist Avner Avrahami, who wrote the texts accompanying her portraits, she is a columnist for several Israeli newspapers.

Galia Gur Zeev is photographer and curator. She was co-founder of the Limbus-Place For Photography in Tel Aviv. From 1992 till 2009 she was the director and curator of this institution.

About the opening speaker:

Avraham Burg (1955), is an Israeli author and politician; he was formerly a member of the Knesset, a chairman of the Jewish Agency of Israel and a Speaker of the Knesset. Burg was Labor Party when a member of the Knesset. In January 2015 Avraham Burg announced that he has joined Hadash – the democratic front for peace and equality for Jews and Arabs.

With the recent boom of the study of social and cultural memory, we have come to believe that remembering is something culturally valid and that there is even an ethical imperative of remembering. This point has been stressed by Jan Philipp Reemtsma who argues that

“We live with the consensus that we need to remember and that we must fight forgetting. (…) But what should be positive about remembering? Remembering and forgetting are human capacities that are neither positive nor negative per se, but are both needed for coping with life.“[1]

There is, indeed, no intrinsic reason why remembering should be given precedence over forgetting. The meaning and value of forgetting solely depends on the social and cultural frames within which it is constructed. For this reason, I will focus in my contribution on some of these frames, analyzing the dynamics of remembering and forgetting in specific socio-historical contexts, analyzing ‘seven types of forgetting’, hoping to thereby gain a deeper insight into its modes of functioning.

Let me start with the observation of a basic asymmetry: not remembering, but forgetting is the default mode of humans and societies. Remembering is negation of and resistance to forgetting, usually involving a will and effort, a veto against the destructive power of time. Just like the cells in an organism, the objects, ideas and individuals of a society are periodically replaced. This slow process of (ex)change is considered natural and does not raise any alarm. Forgetting happens silently, inconspicuously and ubiquitously, while remembering is the unlikely exception from the rule, requiring conscious efforts and specific framework.

Generally speaking, it is only a minimal part of what has been experienced, communicated and produced that actually outlasts a human life and is handed on to future generations. A photo, a necklace, a piece of furniture, a proverb, a recipe, an anecdote – that is, at most – what grandchildren retain from the lives of their grandparents. In families whose homes were bombed during the war, who were forced to flee or just moved frequently, material remains are unlikely to accumulate. Nor are the remains stored in cellars or attics likely to survive much longer; sooner or later they also end up in containers and heaps of rubbish. Individuals may be strongly affected by this ongoing destruction of material remains, but from the perspective of the society as a whole these everyday occurrences are perfectly normal and healthy, evolving smoothly and automatically, attracting no attention whatsoever.

Two motors of forgetting are involved in this silent process. Social forgetting in the bio-rhythm of generational change depends on devaluating and dismissing the experiences of an older generation by a younger generation. In the modern time regime of Western societies, each new generation is eager to create its own defining memories, values and projects by means of which it aims to usurp the place of the former. The other powerful motor of continuous forgetting is disposal of material waste. The force of generational change and the economic acceleration of mass production are not naturally given universals, but consequences of the time regime of modernity in Western societies with its strong emphasis on technical and economic innovation. It is the flip side of this innovation is that commercial products have to be replaced in ever shorter intervals. This form of forgetting consists in the routinized replacement of the old by the new, which is an unchallenged and constituent part of cultural evolution in the domains of science, technology and economy. At the dawn of the industrial revolution in the 19th century, the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson analyzed this process of modernization as a dynamics of innovation and obsolescence. He identified destruction and forgetting as two powerful factors of progress. In order to create something new, he claimed, many things have to disappear “in the inevitable pit which the creation of new thought opens for all that is old”.[2] In an influential essay published in 1841, Emerson enthusiastically described the modern time regime as driven by an irreversible and inexorable ‘fury of disappearance’[3]

“The Greek letters last a little longer, but are passing under the same sentence, and tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation of new thought opens for all that is old. The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet: the new races fed out of the decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old. See the investment of capital in aqueducts made useless by hydraulics; fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by steam, by electricity.” [4]

As a strong supporter of evolution, progress and modernization, Emerson also became an advocate of forgetting. He testified to an exclusive orientation towards the future and described himself as “an endless seeker with no past at my back” (304). The emphatic orientation towards the future automatically withdraws value and attention from the past. As long as the future is the central resource for hope and progress, remembering the past must appear as an obstinate, backward and even pathological deviation from the norm. The limits and problems of this position become obvious as soon as we are dealing with a traumatic past. In 1918, for instance, the American poet Carl Sandburg wrote a poem about the great battlefields of the 19th and 20th century, from the perspective of the grass:[5]

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work –

I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this?

Where are we now?

I am the grass. Let me work.

The cynical tone of the poem suggests that smooth transformation of history into ‘nature’ is unacceptable where human violence, suffering and massive losses are involved. It becomes even more scandalous if it plays into the hands of perpetrators who profit from automatic forgetting in the passage of time. In W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz there is a passage in which he narrator muses

“how little is it that we can keep and hold fast in our memory, how much and how many things continuously slip into forgetting with every extinguished life, how does the world as it were empties itself out, shedding all the stories, that had been connected to innumerable places and objects, which are no longer heard, recorded or transmitted.”[6]

This quotation sounds like an accurate description of inevitable automatic forgetting: after each generation the world, as it were, empties itself spontaneously and stories and memories irrevocably disappear along with the deceased. This, however, is not what the Sebald’s narrator has in mind in this passage. The narrator, in this case, muses about the loss of stories connected to very particular traumatic places: the fortresses of Breendonk and Terezín, which the Nazis turned into a prison and a Jewish Ghetto. If we replace natural death with torture and murder, the context is drastically changed. In light of the suffering of the victims, the automatism of forgetting becomes morally scandalous. In order to separate himself from complicit forgetting, Sebald’s narrator returns to these places of trauma, searching for traces of a lost past and trying to recollect and remember some of the innumerable stories attached to objects and places in order to recover, acknowledge and transmit these stories. The grass of forgetting is not selective – it grows anywhere. Humans, on the other hand, are able to choose between forgetting and remembering which can involve an ethical decision, mobilizing cultural efforts to rescue historical experience from the general pit into which the past always tends to disappear.

2. Preservative forgetting – the entry into the archive

Let us now focus on the unlikely case of something being retained and extracted from the ongoing stream of time and forgetting. Collectors and visitors of flea markets are agents of delay; they protect specific objects from decay by integrating them into their collections. The human urge to attach value to objects and to collect them is the foundation of many a library, gallery or museum. But it is only when the collection is given the protective roof of an institution, that an object has the solid chance of an extended existence. Institutions providing such a social guarantee for preservation include the archive, the library and the museum. Historical archives have evolved rather recently; they were introduced at the time of the French Revolution and have become a stronghold of Western democracies and historical thinking. The historical archive must not be confused with its predecessors, which it has supplanted but not annihilated: the political archives of the state, the church and other institutions of power. While these archives were used as instruments of claiming prestige, establishing legitimation and exerting power, historical archives are intended to serve the commonality: They preserve documents and relicts of the past that have lost their immediate function in the present. It is this form of maintaining elements of the past, cut off from immediate use, that I here refer to as ‘preservative forgetting’.[7] Material preservation of what was once thought or done makes possible its reentry into cultural memory. In this way, the archive creates a space of latency between passive forgetting and active remembering.

It is well known that Nietzsche slandered this institution of the historical archive with his scathing polemic, denouncing the mere storage and accumulation of historical knowledge as a dangerous burden for individual, society and culture. Intentionally or unintentionally, Nietzsche is invoked whenever the problem of data accumulation is addressed in terms of a ‘threatening flood of information’ that is uprooting the sense of identity and orientation. In modern societies, this overload of knowledge production cannot be solved by operations of deleting information, but only with the help of individually applied criteria of selection that separate the relevant from the irrelevant. While the media focus attention and highlight a certain canon of cultural products, it must be emphasized that individuals in Western democracies are no longer told what to remember and what to forget, but are encouraged to make their own choices and develop their own criteria for selection.

But of course they never do this in a void. Humans live in the ‘semiosphere’ (or semiotic ecosystem) of a culture that over a long-term period has gradually established a massive framework for remembering and forgetting. Cultural memory in Western societies relies on a dynamic exchange between two institutions, which I refer to as the canon and the archive. The canon here stands for a small number of cultural messages that are addressed to posterity and intended for continuous repetition and re-actualization. This active form of memory includes sacred texts of religion, important historical events and eminent works of art that future generations – to put it in the words of John Milton – “will not willingly let die”.[8] At the other end of the spectrum, there is the archive, a storehouse for cultural relicts. These relicts have become de-contextualized and disconnected from those frames, which had formerly authorized them or determined their meaning. Through this de-contextualization, these messages have lost their immediate addressees as well as their direct meaning and function. They are, however, not forgotten and thrown away. Instead, they are seen as a source of historical information and are therefore preserved for re-inspection.[9] As part of the archive, these documents exist in a state of latency or transitory forgetfulness, waiting to be rediscovered as fragments of relevant information, to be placed into new contexts and to be charged with new meaning through acts of interpretation. The archive provides the basis on which future historians will be able to reconstruct a past that was once the present.

3. Selective Forgetting – the power of framing

Not only the dynamics of cultural memory but also the dynamics of individual remembering are hinged on processes of selection. While storage space can be infinitely extended and supplemented, memory space remains a rare resource. While the external storage space of computers is growing exponentially, our brains will have to go on working on the more or less limited and invariant basis of their biological infrastructure. This accounts for the huge difference between storing and remembering: while storing provides a device against forgetting, remembering is always a co-product of remembering and forgetting. For this reason, all processes of remembering include various shades of forgetting such as neglecting, overlooking, ignoring. In other words: the gaps created by forgetting are an integral part of remembering, providing its contours.

What, then, are the selection criteria of the economy of memory? How is the relevant separated from the irrelevant, what is to be included or excluded? Nietzsche recommended forgetting from both a practical and moral point of view. To start with the practical perspective: for him it is the aim of the ‘man of action’ to bring memory under the control of his will. Men of action were admired by Nietzsche and Bergson for their capacity to call up only a small segment of relevant memories, which can serve as a motivational impetus towards an intended goal. Everything that cannot be used to achieve this goal has to be “forgotten,” as Nietzsche put it. [10] Today’s cognition psychologists speak of the ‘executive function’, emphasizing the cognitive capacity of ignoring all irrelevant associations in situations of processing information, decision-making and acting.[11] The following sentence in Nietzsche’s text shows that the cognitive and moral dimensions are not always easily separable: “Cheerfulness, a clear conscience, joyful action, trust in the future – all of that depends, in the individual as in a nation, on a line that divides the visible and bright from that which is dark and beyond illumination.”[12] The moral perspective comes to the fore in a famous aphorism, in which Nietzsche shows how memory can become the accomplice of forgetting. In this process, moral issues of guilt and responsibility are glossed over by the stronger socio-psychological norm of face-saving:

In contrast to Freud who developed a theory of repression, Nietzsche worked on an apology for forgetting which he considered to be an anthropological necessity. He legitimized forgetting from the point of view of the strong male ideal of a person who has to act, wield power and muster courage. All of these acts are based on a positive and confident self-image. Maurice Halbwachs transferred these selection criteria from a socio-psychological to a sociological level. He introduced the concept of ‘social frames’ into memory studies, emphasizing the fact that such selection criteria are in fact not defined ad hoc by individuals themselves but are imposed on them by the groups to which they belong.[14] It is thus the desire to belong that regulates the interaction between remembering and forgetting. Each social frame necessarily excludes a whole spectrum of memories which are either considered not relevant or not acceptable from the point of view of the group. It is only when one memory frame is replaced by another that excluded memories have a chance of being re-appropriated by the group (the same holds true for paradigm shifts in the sciences).[15]

In order to better understand current memory politics, we need to combine Halbwachs, who introduced the notion of social frames, with Nietzsche, who added a psychological dimension to the group-specific memories. National memory is usually organized by collective pride, which means that memories of guilt and responsibility have great difficulty entering the historical conscience and consciousness of a society. Next to pride – and this was not yet anticipated by Nietzsche – suffering has also gained a high priority in the construction of national memory. For a long time, West-German post war memory was selectively focused on the suffering of Germans. It took four decades to move from the Germans as victims to the victims of the Germans.[16] One memory frame functioned as a ‘shield’ eclipsing the other: if the national focus is on victimhood this makes it virtually impossible to also accept responsibility for historical crimes. The problem with national narratives is not so much ‘false memory’ but extremely selective and exclusive memory frames. It was only in the 1990s that we could witness a shift in the construction of national memories, moving from purely self-serving narratives to more complex configurations that also integrate negative and shameful aspects into the collective self-image. An obvious new feature of this shift is the ritual of public apologies, which has introduced world wide a new politics of accountability and regret. Rooted in human rights, it is designed to focus not only on a nation’s own suffering but acknowledges and integrates also ones victims into the national memory.

4. Damnatio memoriae – repressive forms of forgetting

In the case of damnatio memoriae forgetting takes on the form of punishment. If a culture values fame and notoriety, considering it a blessing to live on in the memory of posterity, the eradication of a name and other traces of an individual life is considered a serious punishment. In such a culture, ‘mnemocide’, the killing of a person’s memory, is inflicted as a symbolic destruction on an enemy who has fallen from favour. Many cultures share the Egyptian conviction that “a man lives if his name is being mentioned.”[17] Those whose names were erased from the annals or chiseled off from monuments are doomed to die a second death. This form of forgetting, however, is not always practicable, as it provides an instance of what Umberto Eco has described as a general paradox of intentional forgetting: you cannot erase something without at the same time highlighting it and directing attention to what is being rendered invisible.

Historical archives as part of a democratic culture that protects and values the alterity of the past in its own right are a recent institution dating back no later than the French Revolution. Political archives, on the other hand, housing the secret archive of the state as instrument of power and violence, have a much longer history continuing into the present. As long as archives remain sealed, past crimes cannot be historically investigated, as, for instance, the genocide perpetrated on the Armenians. In such a case the victims of violence are bereft of the right to their history. Such repressive forgetting and total control over the past are the topic of George Orwell’s novel 1984.The famous motto of the novel’s fictive state is:

‘Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past.’[18]

Orwell’s text features an archivist whose job it is to constantly adapt the knowledge of the past to the demands of the present. Making the past disappear, however, is a very hard job. Orwell focuses on the enormous efforts that go into this form repressive forgetting. The strategies of manipulating and distorting the truth include the constant rewriting of documents, the retouching of photographs, as well as more casual forms of denial, such as hushing things up, lying and dissimulation. Though highlighted in a novel, these practices are for from being fictive. A famous historical example for such dissimulation is the film commissioned by the SS in 1944, presenting Theresienstadt, a Nazi ghetto for Jewish victims, as an ideal kibbuz. This film was created as an intentional deception to mislead the world about the repressive and lethal conditions of this ghetto. In this deception the genre of the ‘documentary’ was chosen to depict the ‘reality’ of the ghetto, creating the cynical illusion of an idyll. The cynicism of such repressive forgetting found a climax already in the 1930s with Hitler’ question: “Who today still remembers the Armenians?” Like the genocide of the Armenians that occurred under cover of the First World War, the genocide of the Jews occurred under cover of the Second World War and was meant to be forgotten.

Repressive forgetting can also be enforced less directly through forms of ‘structural violence’ (Johan Galtung). In patriarchal societies, women had little or no access to writing and printing, which has led to their effective exclusion from archives and libraries. The following quotation comes not from the iconic essay A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1928) but from a novel by Jane Austen published in 1817. In Persuasion, the female protagonist remarks: “Men have every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.”[19] The same holds true for religious or racial minorities and other oppressed social groups. ‘Structural violence’ creates a cultural frame of power that allows some voices to be heard while others are notoriously silenced. Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is an icon of postcolonial discourse; it shows how difficult it is for some members of society to claim a ‘voice’. Both the African Americans in the U.S.A. and the indigenous populations of colonial countries had similar experiences of an eradication and denial of their ‘history’. Groups that never had a chance to express themselves in writing and who are not equipped with documents collected in archives used to be considered as “void of history” in a Western perspective. Judged against the background of this normative standard, such ‘historical silence’ is today recognized as a manifestation of repressive forgetting. In order to break the silence and restore what has been forgotten to the realm of language and communication, both the structure of power and the cultural frames have to be changed.

5. Defensive and complicit forgetting (protection of perpetrators)

As soon as it becomes obvious that the system of power protecting them is about to collapse, perpetrators of dictatorships and autocratic regimes engage in acts of destroying relics and erasing traces to cover up practices that will henceforth be classified as crimes. Towards the end of the war, the Nazi officials hastily destroyed archival documents of the mass murder of European Jews andmaterial traces of the sites of theses crimes.[20] After 1945, high Nazi functionaries changed their names and identities to escape legal prosecution. It is estimated that up to 80.000 persons chose this under cover existence in post war Germany.[21] While still in power, perpetrators can rely on their laws to guarantee them impunity; but when the legal system changes, they protest against a retrospective application of the new law, opting for amnesty and amnesia. In Argentina, the military junta destroyed all documents of their regime of violence before transitioning to democracy in 1976, and in 1990, the functionaries of the South African Apartheid regime destroyed tons of archival material in the same situation, eliminating potential evidence to be used against them at court. Before the end of the Second World War, seven million membership cards of the NSDAP were brought to a paper-mill near Munich for immediate shredding. They were forgotten, however, in the last chaotic weeks of the war, and later confiscated by the American occupation army. Today they are preserved in the Berlin Document Center, where historians discovered them in 2003. Almost seventy years later, these cards ‘reminded’ a generation of prominent German intellectuals of their NSDAP–membership.[22]

Complicit silence also protects the perpetrators. The most conspicuous example publicly discussed in Germany throughout the year 2010 concerned the charges of sexual abuse brought against the institution of private schools and the Catholic Church. Charges had been made by the victims before, but the information was not passed on but hushed up in order to protect the officials and the respective institution. Those responsible reacted invariably by trivializing, postponing or ignoring the charges. They were confident that by turning a blind eye, this shameful problem could be made to automatically disappear. Taboos preserve a social status quo by exerting a strong conformist pressure. In addition, complicit forgetting is reinforced by the pressure of social taboos; it involves three forms of silence which mutually reinforce each other:

– defensive silence on the part of the perpetrators

– symptomatic silence on the part of the victims and

– complicit silence on the part of society.

When these three forms of silence reinforce each other, crimes can remain concealed for a long time. Nothing will really change as long as the victims are the only ones ready to break their silence and to claim their rights. It is the collective will of society alone which can change the situation and turn the tables. Only then will the testimony of the witnesses be heard and supported by the public media. In a similar way a change of values connected with the introduction of a new political notion of human rights in the 1980s created a new sensibility for the suffering of the victims of such traumatic histories of violence like the Holocaust, slavery, colonialism and dictatorships. After this global change of orientation, the response of the population was transformed from a protection shield for the perpetrators to a sounding board for the victims.

6. Constructive forgetting – tabula rasa for a new political biographical beginning

But forgetting is ambivalent and we must not forget its merits. Among those who The German poet Bertolt Brecht who wrote a poem “In Praise of Forgetting”. It ends with the following lines:

How otherwise could humans, bent down by experience and suffering as they are, ever find the courage to begin anew and to fight their daily battles against repressive conditions? Friedrich Nietzsche was also convinced that without forgetting, humans were unable to live a happy life and to face the challenge of the future: “Cheerfulness, a good conscience, the happy deed, trust in what is to come – all of this depends in the individual as in the nation on a clear line dividing the ordered and clear from the intransparent and dark.”[24] In contrast to repressive forgetting, which supports and maintains power, there is also a hopeful and constructive type of forgetting which supports a break and lays the ground for a new beginning. We can observe that in states that have undergone a political change, many things are speedily forgotten. The demolition of Lenin Statues and the changing of street names after the fall of the Berlin Wall are notorious examples. After the collapse of the GDR, history teachers asked their pupils to tear whole chapters form their textbooks in a spectacular collective act of organized forgetting. Jana Simon recalled such a scene of creating a tabula rasa in her memory novel:

“There is no place where they could retrace their childhood. Most of the clubs of their youth were closed, some of them, even the PW was burnt down, the streets had new names, as well as the schools. The furniture in their parents’ apartments had been exchanged, their houses were renovated, the products of their childhood (…) it was all gone. Their old schoolbooks lay in a heap besides the dustbins, books about the history of the proletariat parts of which they had had to memorize. The ‘rooms of tradition’ in their schools, the ‘groves of honor’, in which the senseless pledges of allegiance to the flag had taken place, all disappeared in memory.”[25]

… or, rather, in the great pit which the creation of a new state opens up for all that is old, to pick up Emerson’s phrase quoted above. In this case, however, we are dealing with a different form of forgetting; it is not caused by the driving force of modern technical innovation (Nr. 1), or instigated by a desire to efface traces in order to escape accountability (Nr. 5); rather, this form of forgetting is created by the strong desire to start over and to effectively adapt to new conditions.

In a recent book on forgettingChristian Meier reminded his readers of this positive and empowering quality of forgetting. He referred to historical cases when after civil wars forgetting was imposed as a means of ending wars and overcoming traumatic violence.[26] With his book he wanted to question a conventional argument that poses remembering as inherently beneficial. But in fact the opposite is closer to the truth, Meier argues, as remembering can perpetuate destructive energies by maintaining hatred and revenge, while forgetting can put an end to conflict and thus appease opposing parties. While it does not possess the power to prescribe individual remembering or forgetting, the state can pass laws that punish public discourse which re-opens old wounds by mobilizing old resentments and aggressions. Such laws of forgetting were frequently passed to end civil wars; examples for this practice include the Athenian polis after the Peleponnesian War, the edict of Nantes in 1598 and in the peace treaty of Münster-Osnabrück in 1648. In these cases, legislation imposing forgetting indeed promoted a political and social integration. The most recent example named by Meier is the First World War, which the Germans remembered much too accurately and persistently. This memory was in fact used to fuel the mobilization of Germans for the Second World War. After 1945 it was the weakness of their memory that gave the Germans that had survived the war the strength to start over. The therapy of forgetting was also applied by the former allies to overcome past hatred and to lay the foundation for a new Europe. Here is Winston Churchill’s plea for forgetting that he made in a speech in Zurich in 1946:

“We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges, which have sprung from the injuries of the past. If Europe is to be saved from infinite misery, and indeed from final doom, there must be an act of faith in the European family and an act of oblivion against all the crimes and follies of the past.”[27]

7. Therapeutic forgetting – leaving the burden of the past behind

Over the last three decades, constructive forgetting has been rivaled by a new positive form of forgetting, which I call ‘therapeutic forgetting’. On a global scale people could make the experience that traumatic pasts do not simply disappear but return and claim attention, recognition, restitution and remembrance. Forgetting, in this case, was replaced by new efforts at remembering as the preferred strategy.[28] But, as I want to show, this form of remembering is also connected to forgetting and perhaps even directed towards it.

Therapeutic or transitional ‘remembering in order to forget’ is not a new discovery in Western culture. In the ritual framework of Christian confession, for instance, remembering is the gateway to forgetting: sins have first to be articulated and listed before they can be erased through the absolution of the priest. A similar logic is at work in the artistic concept of ‘catharsis’: through the re-presentation of a painful event on stage, a traumatic past can be collectively re-lived and overcome. According to the theory of Aristotle, the group that undergoes such a process is purged through this shared experience. Forgetting through remembering is essentially also the goal of Freudian psychotherapy: a painful past has to be raised to the level of language and consciousness to enable the patient to move forward and leave that past behind. This was also the aim of staging remembering in South Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission designed by Bishop Tutu and Alex Boraine created a new form of public ritual, which combined features of the tribunal, the cathartic drama and the Christian confession. In these public rituals a traumatic event had to be publicly narrated and shared; the victim had to relate his or her experience, which had to be witnessed and acknowledged by the perpetrator before it could be erased from social memory.

Postscriptum

I started this survey with the observation of a basic asymmetry: forgetting, we had assumed, is always stronger than remembering because there is no ‘automatic mode of remembering’, which is the reason why ‘the greatest part’ of a former present is always ‘lost’. We had assumed that forgetting does its work silently and automatically, like a servant who is invisible, always on duty and doesn’t need to be paid. We had assumed that forgetting does its work silently and automatically, like a servant who is invisible, always on duty and doesn’t need to be paid. Recently, however, we had a wake up call, reminding us that in the Internet, we can no longer rely on ‘automatic forgetting’. The alarm came about with a judgment of the European Court in May 2014 enforcing ‘a right to be forgotten’, thus answering the demand of individuals to be protected against incriminating personal information by deleting it in the collective memory of the Internet. This new form of legislation made manifest that our new digital technology of writing, storing and circulating has overturned deeply rooted premises of our culture. One commenter has written: „Since the beginning of human history forgetting was the rule and remembering the exception. (…) Due to the invention and dissemination of digital technology forgetting must today be considered as the exception while remembering has become the rule.”[29] Until recently, it was far from clear whether forgetting or remembering took precedence in the information economy of the Internet. There were two theories competing with each other; the first being: „The net forgets nothing” and the second: „what is stored is forgotten“.[30] These contradictory approaches to the Internet teach us that we should not indulge in a technological determinism but rather seek to understand how the new media interact with human demands and their social, cultural and legal frames. The new legal frame answers a human demand in creating a personal protection shield relating to sensitive information that was hitherto within the reach of only very few and is now, in the virtual archive, publicly accessible and indiscriminately circulating. Generalizing, we may say that the Internet has introduced two dramatic changes into our economy of information, knowledge and communication. One is the function of easily storing, preserving and rendering searchable a hitherto unknown mass of data. Andrew Hoskins, specialist for digital memory and editor of the Journal Memory Studies is a proponent of the theory that the Internet forgets nothing (like Freud’s Unconscious, we may add). He has described this change as “the end of decay time”, which is to say that the Internet arrests the flow of time and suspends its erosive effects. The other dramatic change involves the indefinite enlarging of the public realm through radically new possibilities of access to and availability of information. Under these circumstances in which knowing has become a potential within (almost) everybody’s reach, not knowing has to be consciously produced under the auspices of legal supervision.

Conclusion

One thing should have become obvious in my overview, and that is the fact that remembering and forgetting cannot be neatly separated from each other. They interact in different ways, as I tried to show in the different forms of forgetting. Nor are remembering and forgetting inherently good or bad; their quality depends entirely on the uses to which they are put. Looking back at the various social frames and cultural contexts that I have analyzed, we may say that the first three forms of forgetting can be described as morally neutral; they are linked to the inbuilt temporal dynamics of consumer culture and technological innovation, to archival preservation and to the indispensible frames of selection in cognitive processes. Types 4 and 5 carry negative connotations; they show how forgetting is used as a weapon, as a means of maintaining power and as a protective shield for perpetrators. The last two forms of forgetting, on the other hand, have distinctly positive connotations. They represent two forms of marking a break in values and introducing a new beginning. The radical strategy of creating a tabula rasa, however, seems to be more and more given up in favor of a new form of rupture and forgetting. While in the first case, the page is simply turned over, in the second case, the page must be read before it is turned. Therapeutic forgetting thus invokes remembering as its first stage and is thus the result of a memory that has been reworked and processed. And one more general observation: forgetting is not necessarily final: much can be retrieved and reinterpreted after shorter or longer intervals. What can be recovered and used, however, always depends on cultural values inscribed into social frames of selection. As remembering can be re-inscribed into forgetting, remembering is always framed by forgetting. It was Francis Bacon who found a simple and striking image for this complex interaction: ‘When you carry the light into one corner, you darken the rest.’[31]

[7] Friedrich Georg Jünger, Gedächtnis und Erinnerung, Frankfurt a.M. (1957), 16-17. Jünger distinguishes between two forms of forgetting: one that is connected with a irreversible loss, and one the is premised on potential recovery. (With Avishai Margalit we dan also refer to these two forms of fortetting as ‚blotting out’ and ‚covering up’). Jünger’s concept of ‚preservative forgetting’ (Verwahrensvergessen) assumes for the forgotten a state of latency that makes possible its return into the conscious present.

[8] John Milton spoke of “an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life) joyn’d with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let die. The Reason of Church-Government urged against Prelating (1641), Book II, Introduction. xxxx

[15] Karl Schlögel writes on forgetting in the context of scientific paradigm shifts: “When such a shift happens, one frame of interpretation has come to an end, is eroded, discarded, and replaced by another one, without leaving a trace of former contestations. One chapter is closed, another one is opened.” Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik, München (2003), 60.

[16] Robert G. Moeller, War Stories. The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, Berkeley (2001).

For the next two years together with many partners from Amsterdam and abroad we want to look at how memory works: private memory and collective memory. We want to look at how memory shapes our culture and our identity and what mechanisms are there to discover when it comes to constructing and deconstructing, using and abusing collective memory and identity. After the year programmes about Freedom (2012) and Friendship (2013) this seems for us a logical next step in exploring the core values of Castrum Peregrini. The history of Castrum Peregrini as a hiding place during World War II and it’s reality since was defined by freedom, friendship and culture. Back then it was a safe house for youngsters that found shelter in a group of friends, constructing a shield of poetry and art that protected them,- not an iron dome but a culture dome so to speak. Gisèle, who organised the shelter and founded Castrum Peregrini, was herself an artist. She died here in her studio last year at the age of a hundred years as the last one of this group. Our house is her visual diary. To us, the current generation taking care of this place, it is obvious that the war in Europe may be over, but that the enemy of culture and the human simply keeps shape shifting. That is why we see memory not as static and dead, but as a living and volatile matter.

“ Remembering and forgetting are not necessarily polar opposites; more often than not they are mutually dependent and linked to each other in a dynamic relation. Though it may seem counter-intuitive that forgetting can be willfully achieved through intentional actions, it is an important factor in social dynamics, political processes and cultural practices. The lecture will analyze various form and functions of forgetting in their socio-cultural contexts. It will also ask the question whether the Internet age has introduced a new media situation that has radically changed the ecology of remembering and forgetting.” Aleida Assman:

Castrum Peregrini, Herengracht 401, 1017 BP Amsterdam

Guided tours with curator every Saturday 16 hrs; Please subscribe for the tours at mail@castrumperegrini.nl

Ronit Porat

Summer 2014 Ronit Porat was Artist in Residence at Castrum Peregrini. After a first visit to the house and especially the hiding place in spring 2104 she now (August/September 2014) researches the space as a detective in a crime scene combining her own strongly biographical visual repertoire with the found footage and her research of the stories and witnesses of Castrum Peregrini’s clandestine community.

The outcome of her research and her residency will result in a work shown during the group exhibition In Search of Lost Time that will open on 19 September.

..

Please click here for the

detailed programme of

Participation on Trial

and practical information.

This autumn Castrum Peregrini will host a two-day international conference on participatory art. The aim of the conference is to unfold the complex ethical and philosophical issues that surround participatory art projects, and to encourage the audience to form an opinion and determine their own position. Participants include Mieke Bal (cultural theorist and critic),Ruth Noack(curator and writer), Henk Oosterling (philosopher), Chrissie Tiller
(Programme Convenor at Goldsmiths College), Nina Folkersma and many others.

The first day of the conference, Friday October 10, will be an enacted court case. During this public court hearing questions around participatory art will be addressed in a polemic manner. All speakers and participants get a specific role: as judge, prosecutor, lawyer, witness or external expert. Taking up these roles they will discuss all the arguments in a playful but serious manner.

The second day, Saturday October 11, will focus on the practice of participation: how to do it? Which approach works and which does not? The toolkit that was developed in the TimeCase project will be launched and some inspiring case studies will be presented and discussed.

We hope to welcome you on both days. Please mark the dates October 10 and 11 in your calender. The full programme will be published very soon on www.castrumperegrini.org.

Participation on Trial is organised by Castrum Peregrini in close collaboration with curator Nina Folkersma and in cooperation with the Fonds Voor Cultuurparticipatie, Goethe Institut, Utrecht School of Arts, and Rietveld Academie Amsterdam; in the framework of the Erasmus project TimeCase.

Een samwenwerking

en Castrum Peregrini.

Nov 2013- Nov 2014.

Amie Dicke:

When I first saw the scribble saying ’DO NOT TOUCH~ I am sorting important souvnirs’ on top of an untouched pile of papers, this message perfectly described my own observations at Castrum Peregrini. The note was one of the many small personal reminders from the studio of artist Gisèle (1912-2013), which she wrote down to organize her daily life in the house she eventually lived in for seventy years.

I found more important souvenirs, not only on top of or under her piles, but in the margins of her (hand)writings and on the back of old photos and other images and objects. Even in the unwritten or not used paper, I found a story of the unmade.

The more I visit the house the more I see it extending beyond its own walls. I see patterns and relations. I wonder where the images, the pictures I took, actually have their origin. To what extend do the house and the ‘important souvnirs’ affect my perception? Please follow my ongoing exploration at:

Silent Heroes

The Learning Partnerships looks back on an exciting and rich first half of the project.

The project has made a vibrant start during its first partners meeting in Amsterdam during which the partners have agreed on a structure, method, division of tasks and timeline to approach the project objectives to

be a platform for exchange on the subject of hiding in museum-, memory- and learning environment

find and map stories of hiding and build a website that makes them accessible for a broader public.

give the visitor/learner an active role in finding stories of hiding, making use of online tools and the possibilities of smart-phone recordings

Dates for the immediate next meetings have been agreed as well as the order of meetings. Most meetings will be realized in the second half of the project due to the local agendas that made it more useful for the project to tap into activities of the partners that provide the project with promising synergies.

Amsterdam, 8-10 December 2013, realized

Hohenems, 15-17 June 2014, realized

Berlin, 20-23 September 2014, confirmed

Warsaw, February 2016, to be decided

Hungary, April 2016, to be decided

Amsterdam, June 2016, to be decided

To achieve the projects aims the partners have agreed

– that each partner will be hosting a meeting presents their local museum/educational works concerning silent heroes, and the gaps that they have identified in their context. Both the realized projects/permanent offers as well as the discussion around the development of the respective organization will be addressed with a discussion and written feedback of all partners. To this end a questionnaire has been designed, that will be used by all staff and learners at all meetings. The questionnaires will be collected by the co-ordinator and the outcomes will be made available on the website; the partners strive for comparability in order to draw conclusions for all partners to inform their organizational development plans.

– to build, design, develop and maintain a project website that features their local online resources already available, the partners case studies with the respective peer feedback gathered from the staff and learners and the findings and personal narratives connected with the local reality of the partners and their audience working with silent heroes. This may also require to assign a researcher with analyzing and drawing conclusions from the comparative overview in conjunction with the steering group member’s, which are the representatives of the partner organizations.

The consortium has realized that the material gathered and the research questions (questionnaire) applied are so exciting in terms of outcomes that already after the first two meetings it has become clear that partners want to sustain the outcomes, that especially the website will be developed with a longer term perspective and that it will be extended by other European countries that had a history of hiding during the 2nd world war.

The time planning foresees to have a first draft of the website presented during the next partners meeting in Berlin in September. During the meeting in Warsaw the content to date should be up and online.

In terms of content we have looked at stories of hiding in Amsterdam and those of the silent heroes that helped Jews cross the Austrian/German-Swiss boarder in Hohenems. Examples reach from museum exhibitions (Anne Frank House) to the role of contemporary art in dealing with the past (Castrum Peregrini), the medium of film (Akte Grüninger) and walking tours (Hohenems). In the second part we look ahead to see how Berlin addressed the silent heroes from the German perspective, to Warsaw how a newly established Museum deals with the diversity of viewpoints (with a special focus on the righteous among the nations) and to Hungary with respect to civil society initiatives and walking tours as educational means. Finally in Amsterdam, the Jewish History Museum will conclude the partner meetings with scrutinizing their new initiative ‘Jewish quarter/holocaust memorial’.

All partners are highly motivated and the consortium looks forward to a dynamic and fruitful further learning experience.

Questions for structuring each meeting, for looking at case studies and also for peer coaching feedback on cases presented and discussed:

1) How are the roles of historic persons in the respective memory setting represented:

hiders

helpers
i. passive/silent
ii. active/heroic

2) How are historic sources being used?

3) How is the materiality of the place/space preserved?

Conserved

Reconstructed

Deconstructed

4) Is there a link with the current issues of societies?

Are moral and ethical questions addressed?

Are political questions raised?

Is there space for a philosophical/artistic take on the past?

5) Is the question of identity and image building addressed, especially how the image building has changed in the historic perception of the last 7 decades?

What is the distinct presentation approach, what is the (possibly unique) museological vision/concept and what part does (adult)education play in it?

Quitte le Pouvoir

zaterdag 22 en zondag 23 maart 2014, 14uur

Welcome at the sneak preview of the film‘Quitte le Pouvoir’(30min) and the exhibition of Limited Editions drawings and animations from the film. When a group of young rappers from Dakar, Senegal, join forces through their music to create a revolte, the presidential elections get a surprising turn.

The Senegalese rapper Cheikh Diarra of the group Y’en a marre (Fed Up) will be present. A film made by: Aida Grovestins (director / producer), Machteld Aardse (drawings for animations / producer) and Hanneke van der Linden (animations).

Please let us know if you want to attend Saturday 22/3 at 2pm Sunday 23/3 at 2 pm

Summary

This project brings together organisations in the field of holocaust memory and adult learning about the second world war. They share an interest in the history of hiding and the role of oral history for a learning environment that fosters active participation of learners in Museum settings. The project wants to

– be a platform for exchange on the subject of hiding in museum-, memory- and learning environments.

– find and map stories of hiding and build a website that makes them accessible for a broader public.

– give the visitor/learner an active role in finding stories of hiding, making use of online tools and the possibilities of smart-phone recordings.

The last generation of survivors will be in the focus of the activities and also the second generation of family and friends of survivors will be interviewed. The stories will be collected in an online database that can be used by all partners involved and by the wider sector of adult education that addresses the historic role of shelter. This project wants to develop an overarching web portal for the partners websites displaying Hiding places and their stories.

The physical places like the Anne Frank House, Castrum Peregrini and those collected e.g. by the Gedenkstätte Stille Helden in Berlin, will be visited and scrutinized with respect to their methodology of preservation, access for the broader public and educational material and activities.

External funding will ensure broad visibility of the website in all partner countries involved. A sustainability plan must ensure that after the learning partnership ends, the website will be further maintained and that it will be extended by other European countries that had a history of hiding during the 2nd world war.

29 november – 1 december

Castrum Peregrini participates in

all (S)ELECTED artists are present, with daily performances by:

Eamonn Harnett at 14.00 hrsSilvia Martes at 16.00 hrs

During this annual event galleries, post-graduate artists-in-residence, museums and other cultural institutions hold exciting state-of-the-art exhibitions with works by young and established international artists. The Amsterdam Art Weekend makes top quality contemporary art accessible to an audience varying from international professionals to arts aficionados and curious visitors.

With support of the Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam based artist Amie Dickewill work as an artistic researcher around the essence of stories as they are manifested in Castrum Peregrini’s heritage.
Amie Dicke is present on Friday 29 and Saturday 30 November between 3 – 6 pm

In the autumn of 2013, Barbara Steinerspent a month as curator-in-residence in Amsterdam. This residency programme was initiated by the Goethe-Institut Netherlands and put into practice in collaboration with and at Castrum Peregrini. During her stay in the Netherlands, Steiner did extensive research on the relations between design and art, taking a closer look at the respective practices, and the dissolution of traditional disciplinary borders. On the basis of this research, Steiner is planning to curate an exhibition that is to be held at Castrum Peregrini in the autumn of 2014.

Barbara Steiner is curator, editor, author and lecturer. In 2012 and 2013, she was the Artistic Director of Europe (to the power of) n, a two-year project which took place in eleven cities in- and outside the European Union. From 2001 to 2011, Steiner was the Director of the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (GfZK). Prior to that, she ran art associations in Ludwigsburg and Wolfsburg.

In her work, Steiner focuses on politics of representation, institutional critique/criticality, architecture, design and display. She examines political, economic, social and cultural conditions and draws particular attention to various concerns and interconnected processes of negotiation. These are not only interesting in terms of theory and cultural discourse, but they also become evident in exhibitions and other art projects. Steiner’s exhibitions, lectures, and publications reveal that she views all of the institution’s activities and structures as integral parts of its programme. It is her aim to make these interdependencies the subject of public reflection and discussion.

Steiner studied Art History and Political Science at the University of Vienna. She wrote a doctoral thesis on the „Ideology of the White Cube“.

The Polemic Sensibility

from Iran

An exhibition curated by Shaheen Merali

The exhibition is a result of a curatorial decision to raise awareness of the development in Iranian aesthetics as part of the political and cultural reality of this country. It is sourced from the inevitably finite series of creative works that came from Iran in a period when artists felt they needed to further question their experiences of reality at the time of the tenth presidential election, which was held on 12th June 2009. Millions of Iranians gathered in Iranian cities and around the world in post-election protests and further inspired the emergence of the opposition Iranian Green Movement.

The actual, as well as the mental journeys towards being excluded – often feeling confined – produced new identities based on introspection, often producing an auto-critique of the lack of progress in their lives. The volatile condition within and without, the confusion, the bewilderment and the total failure of the system gave way to doubts and led to a collective sense of disillusionment with the whole.

This cultural awakening, constructed in images and text, thread and paint, video and graphics reflects the increasing place of protest and activism, but, more significantly, the works are engaged with how these visual encounters further the scope of Iran’s contemporary language – deliberate, considered and, at points, provocative in its poetic demand. Curiosity re-establishes the demand to connect with the harsh reality of everyday life within a critical artistic discourse.